Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Boone's Farm 2: Wine Product

After a few weekends sitting on the porch watching the grass grow, I realized that it's really difficult to actually get drunk on Boone's Farm. I didn't mind that--it was like drinking Kool Aid all night long, except sweeter and slightly carbonated (yes, these wines have a screw top). Jim, however, was (and still is) prone to...ahem...push the envelope.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first thing that endeared Boone's to me was that there were about 10 different flavors, all named like detergents. I didn't notice it until just now, but to me, different names meant a different flavor. And since my attention span is basically non existent, I NEED different flavors if I'm going to be drinking what is essentially the same damn wine product all night long.

Sad to say, I can't recall the names of my favorite one. There was a sort of second generation of wine product back then, in retrospect very specifically geared for girls with too much self respect than to walk around with an actual wine cooler OR be caught dead with a bottle of Mad Dog/Night Train/Thunderbird.

On a side note, did you know that Night Train was referenced (either by drinking or actually mentioning) five times in the Blues Brothers movie? Yup.

Anyway, by the end of the summer Jim and I were racing to see who could finish a bottle of this stuff first. He won, always, because I just never figured out the technique, and even at $1.80 a bottle I wasn't too interested in running out early. But we fiddled around with it, making the sort of arbitrary but necessary rules that became such a part of the Land Speed Record (as it was soon dubbed) mythos.

Then came the road trip to New York, which story has done been told (I think all you regulars were on board for that one, but you can find it in the archives if you don't remember it), and upon my return I was broke enough that I didn't have any CHOICE but to drink the Boone's, and I had every reason to get just as trashed as I could.

The following spring I had managed to dig myself out of the emotional pit that I'd been in, thanks in large part to Daniel-san and a few cute girls. I was back in school, had met a crop of new people, and was in general having a good time with life again. We also ate a lot of acid back then, and since LSD didn't react well with sweet, carbonated wines like Boone's, I backed off of that in favor of big jugs of Rhine Flur wines and a lot of Jim Beam.

But the Boone's would still come out on special occasions, and actually developed into a kind of party game--two 3 person teams would compete, and the winners, well, they won. During that summer, we slowly whittled away at the record, approaching what I felt was the asymptotic time of 20 seconds.

And then, at the end of the summer, a bunch of rather unpleasant stuff happened, and I found myself basically alone once more. I went from 3 roommates to zero in less than a month, and I found that the money I'd been giving one of my roommates for rent hadn't been making it to the landlady, so I was in pretty deep with her (in fact, if the house hadn't rented for $200 a month, I probably would have been homeless).

This was the winter of the Story of Kim, the winter of bad poetry and very weird women and a general feeling that winter just wasn't going to be my season. Boone's farm dropped off the radar, because there WERE no special events, and I was too broke to care anyway.